Over Tumbled Graves (30 page)

There was another awkwardness, and Caroline was saved by the ring of her phone. She grabbed it as if it were a life preserver. “Mabry.”

“Where have you been? I’ve been leaving messages at your house.”

It was Joel. “I got them,” she said. “I’ve been really busy.”

“I need to see you.”

“Can’t,” she said, “I’m invisible.” She smiled because it was so stupid, something Dupree would throw off. In front of her, they were standing at the conference table now, the producer making plans to meet Spivey and the two profilers later at the dump site. The phone at her ear, Caroline watched McDaniel work the skinny, young producer, his pelvis thrust forward, hands on his hips.

“I understand why you’re mad,” Joel said.

“I’m not mad,” she answered, and that seemed true enough.

“Disappointed, then. I understand. I’ve been disappointed with myself.”

“Joel, this really isn’t the time…”

“I was immature. I made a mistake. I was afraid.” The words tumbled from the phone. “Can’t I see you?”

“I’m very busy, Joel.”

“There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

“No,” she said, “there’s no one else.” And saying that made her think about Lenny Ryan again, that if he wasn’t the killer, there had to be someone else, someone strong, someone obsessed with women, someone still out there.

“Meet me somewhere,” Joel said. “I have something for you.”

The producer walked to the door and McDaniel walked with her, his hand resting in the small of her back as he leaned down to tell her something.

Caroline caught Blanton’s eye and he made a little drinking motion with his right hand. She shook her head and Blanton rolled his eyes. They’d gone for drinks a few times after work and Caroline had begun to worry that she enjoyed his company. Last night, he’d confessed that even though he hated McDaniel’s
Dateline
idea, his agent would kill him if he passed up a network appearance. As long as there were serial murders, Blanton could consult on TV shows and movies and write the occasional book and make a living while stabbing away at his own dark psychology.

There’s no one else
. The killer would be familiar with Spokane, would know how to prepare a body, and, according to Blanton, reflected the unique behaviors of several other serial killers.

“Caroline?” Joel continued. “One drink? Okay?”

She looked across the room at Spivey, his tie knotted so firmly that his shirt collar bunched up beneath it. The killer would be
someone physically strong, knowledgeable of prostitutes and police. Taxi driver. Cop. Bartender. “Okay,” she said. “One drink.”

“Great.” Joel sounded relieved.

At the door, McDaniel had pulled his hands out of his pockets and was patting the producer on the shoulder, his hand lingering for a quick squeeze. The producer walked out the door and McDaniel turned to glare at Blanton.

“I’ll come get you,” Joel said. “Say six?”

“That’s fine,” she said.

“Caroline, are you sure there’s nobody else?”

Spivey and the two profilers drifted back to work. It was chilling to imagine, starting over, as Blanton said, building this guy from the ground up.

“No. There’s no one else,” she said.

The calf had fallen into what Angela called a coulee, what Lenny’s dad had called a draw. Those were the kinds of differences he found between Washington and California, little gaps within the names of things that shook Lenny’s confidence that he would ever completely fit here. Either way—coulee or draw—Lenny stood at the edge of it, panting from hard work in the late-morning sun. He looked down into a steep gully perhaps twenty feet long and as wide as it was deep, maybe six feet, its sides caved inward like parentheses. It was a sinkhole or small pond in the spring, opening like a sigh in the soft ground, but now its banks were dry and dusty and had apparently flaked off beneath the poor calf’s hooves as it tried to escape. Lying on its side in a bed of loose dirt, the dead calf was buzzed by flies that lit on its nose and its mouth and its open eyes.

Lenny dropped his wire cutters, took off his gloves, and crouched at the side of the gully, trying to determine where this calf had come from. A few feet away the cattle trail ran from the creek through this field, and Lenny could see no hoofprints where the calf might have veered off the trail. It was one of the things he’d
noticed about cattle the last couple of months; their trails were as thin as bicycle trails, and no matter how many were in the herd or how widely they spread to graze, when they were on the move to the creek or to the salt blocks it was in a single-file line with not a whit of variation. If the lead animal walked in a loop, each animal that followed made the exact same loop.

But for some reason this calf had ventured away from the cattle trail—no more than four feet, but far enough. It didn’t make sense. Lenny could see where the lip of the ditch had given way and the calf had gone tumbling in.

He walked back to the cattle trail, trying to figure out what made this calf walk away from the herd. He’d seen these cattle, Angela’s neighbor’s—maybe thirty head—moving through the field beyond Angela’s house, on the other side of the fence he was fixing. In the afternoon they made their way in a tight single file down the trail toward the creek and drinking water. The cattle spread out along the creek like a stain on the earth, and in the evening Lenny would stand on Angela’s porch with a glass of sun tea and watch them gather again without any apparent signal and begin making their way single-file back to the fields, where they would graze all morning. More than likely the accident happened at night when the calf couldn’t see well, but that still didn’t explain it. Maybe something scared the calf away from the herd. A dog. Or a coyote. Lenny looked for prints near the cattle trail, but dogs and coyotes were so light, and he was so inexperienced at tracking, that he couldn’t make out anything. It frustrated him, to be able to see so clearly
what
happened—a calf fell in a ditch—without knowing
how
or
why
.

He’d always believed that the
why
of things didn’t matter; the outcome was the only thing worth knowing. It was another kind of torture trying to figure out
why
, as pointless and cruel as a calf trying to scramble up the soft walls of a ditch. He stood over the coulee, put his gloves back on, and jumped into the ditch, landing next to the dead calf. The flies buzzed around him, then settled back on the calf’s head. The walls of the coulee were almost as tall as he was, and he could barely see out. Lenny grabbed the calf by its ankles, two in each of his gloved hands, and swung it up and over the side of the draw. It landed above him with a sigh of dust.

As he crawled out, the dirt gave way beneath his boots and he experienced for a moment the animal’s panic. Outside the coulee, he knocked the dirt from his gloves, picked the calf up by its legs again, swung it in the air, and draped it over his shoulders. He began walking to the neighbor’s house, dry grass crunching beneath the boots. He walked through the field, along the creek, and up the dirt driveway between Angela’s cabin and the neighbor’s tin-roofed house. The house was built around a single-wide trailer and stood among a light stand of birch trees. By the time Lenny reached the driveway he was nearly sick from the heat and the smell of the calf. The neighbor was standing next to the house as if he’d been expecting someone. Pushing seventy, he had a shock of gray hair that rose from his head like a cold flame.

“Whatcha got?” he called when Lenny was close enough.

“He must’ve fallen into the…into the coulee.” Lenny came up the driveway and swung the calf down into the gravel between the tire tracks, a few feet from the old rancher’s shoes. Lenny coughed and spit into the dirt next to the driveway.

The old farmer’s cheeks were dusted with wiry gray whiskers that he scratched as he looked down at his dead calf. A spaniel dog sniffed around the animal’s head; the man kicked at the dog and it scampered away sideways.

“Shit,” the neighbor said finally. “That’s too bad.”

Lenny removed a glove and stuck his hand out for the neighbor to shake and he did. “I’m Gene,” Lenny said. “I’m…uh…staying up there with Angela.”

But the old rancher didn’t introduce himself, just looked down at the calf, and so Lenny did too. Lying on its side like that the calf seemed so slender, almost two-dimensional, like a painting.

“Angela got pigs up there?” the neighbor asked.

“What’s that?”

“Pigs.” Finally the old man looked up. “I ain’t got any pigs to feed it to. I gave up my pigs, shoot, goin’ on a couple a years now.”

“No,” Lenny said. “She doesn’t have any pigs.”

“That is a shame,” the old guy said, then he kicked at the dead animal. “Hate to see it go to waste.”

Lenny put his gloves back on. “So what do you suppose happened?”

“Hmm?”

“To the calf. What do you think happened?”

“Fell in a ditch.”

“Yeah, I mean…well, does that happen a lot?”

He shrugged. “Some.”

“Do you know what causes it?”

“The herd runs and a few go in the wrong direction.”

“What makes ’em run?”

“Thunder, mostly.”

Lenny looked down at the calf and remembered the electrical storm two nights earlier, a couple of quiet flashes and then a flash and a boom right after. “And do they usually die like this?”

“If they don’t get out or if I don’t hear ’em and pull ’em out.”

“You ever seen one fall in?”

The neighbor thought about this. “No. Guess I haven’t.”

They were quiet for a moment and then Lenny banged his gloves together where his thumbs met his forefingers. He wiggled his fingers in his gloves. “Well, I just couldn’t figure out how it happened. That’s all.”

The old man squinted at Lenny. “You know, they ain’t particularly smart animals. ’Specially the little ones.”

“No,” Lenny said, “I guess not.” He nodded to the old rancher and began walking back along the driveway. Maybe he’d be like the old rancher someday, accepting of all the troubles in the world, the basic principle that small ones don’t stand much of a chance and that a clap of thunder can panic even the most sedate animal.

Little plumes of dust erupted in front of his feet as Lenny moved along the dirt road toward Angela’s cabin. At the top of the hill, the pickup truck that delivered the mail was parked at the bank of mailboxes where the dirt road met the highway and so Lenny headed up that way, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his one pair of jeans. It was a small bearable moment, this one—these boots and these jeans and the neighbor and the dirt plumes of the driveway. He’d shaved his beard and his hair was growing back and Angela dyed it white blond so that it covered his head like first snow.

The big mailbox held a power bill and a Pottery Barn catalogue and an envelope from Spokane County Superior Court. It
took a moment for Lenny to recognize Angela’s husband’s name—David Nickell—on the envelope. Another moment to remember that he had used that name to request documents.

He tore into the envelope. On top was a receipt for the copies and a note from the clerk saying this particular civil suit had just been settled. Lenny flipped through thirty pages of court files, beginning with the complaint, which said the building and alley where the body was found had been owned by SMRC, a real estate company in Seattle and had been purchased for $95,000 cash in January of this year by John Landers, the owner of the boat dealership across the street. When Landers began renovating the building and announced that an electronics company would move in, the real estate people from Seattle sued, saying that Landers had arranged to lease the building while it was still under the Seattle company’s ownership and that by not telling them about the electronics company’s interest, Landers withheld information that would have made the property more valuable before the sale.

Next came the defendant’s statement, a short summary from John Landers in which he admitted having preliminary talks with the electronics company about relocating to the building on East Sprague if he purchased it, but that the deal was

Lenny let the pages fall to his side and he stared down the road to Angela’s cabin. It had sounded so crazy that day in the park, like conspiracy talk, like the pimp was just making something up to keep from getting killed. He said that he hadn’t killed Shelly—of course, Lenny didn’t believe him—and had no idea who did. He said that a few days after Shelly disappeared, some old guy stopped him in an alley, and had warned him that he needed to move his girls out of the neighborhood or it would be on his head. Lenny had thought the whole story was bullshit, but when he began snooping around the boat dealership and the businesses around it, he found the body in the refrigerator.

He wished he was smarter, that he could put things together in his mind. He’d talked to hookers, read through classified ads, looked at deeds of trust, and tried to figure out who would want to get rid of the hookers. But none of it made sense. A person acquires a certain understanding of the world—knows, for instance, that water flows downhill—and anything different is incomprehensible. Maybe he knew no more about people like John Landers than he did about thunder and cattle.

Lenny started back for the house, which sat on a small rise above the creek, in the shade of a stand of tamarack trees. It would have been good to stay here. He liked how Angela sometimes waited for him on the porch in her apron, supper on the table.

At the house, Lenny changed out of his workshirt and dirty jeans and into his khaki pants and black T-shirt, the clothes he’d arrived in. He tried to picture what he would do when he came face-to-face with Mr. John Landers. Would he shoot the man like he’d done at the pawnshop? Would the clap of gunshot surprise him a little and give him pause again? Or was he a different man now?

He grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote her name, “Angela,” and then stopped and stared at the page. Finally, he wrote, “Had to go to Spokane. Don’t wait up.” It would have been cool to get some cattle of his own. That would have been something.

He started to write the name “Gene,” but crossed it out and wrote “Lenny” on the bottom of the note. Then he lifted the pen to his mouth, chewed on the cap, put it back to the paper, and just above his name wrote “Love.”